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Microindie



Microindie Records is (as you would guess) a small, home-run record label that specializes in smallish runs of great records and CDs. I came to know the label's owner Mike back in 1995, when, under a different label (Drive-In Records), he put out my former band cuppa joe's 7" single -which I mentioned in a roundabout way in a previous post)

Mike created Microindie as an offshoot to Drive-In in the early 2000's, and in 2005 he asked me to design a logo for the label. Being a small label, they didn't have a huge budget, so this was the kind of logo project where I do all the exploration work on my own, and give the client a final design - which Mike was fine with. I still did lots of sketching - I just didn't follow through with the alternate concepts, and didn't have get those concepts in shape for a client to see them.

I think Mike suggested, or even specifically requested, a vinyl record coming out of an envelope - or maybe not. But either way,it seemed logical way to go - the label does a lot of mail order work. So here's what I came up with:


Yep - record coming out of envelope. Lo-fi typefaces, and a little ruler-like line with tic marks, to indicate the micro-ness. I gave him the full color version, one-color version (seen here in all-brown and all-black variations), and a grayscale verison. I'm not sure if he used any of the versions besides the full color, but hey - at least he had them available.

This was a two-color logo - I picked out the browny-orange color and only used tints of that color and black. Were this logo ever used in offset printing, with spot colors, that would allow the extra tints (which kind of register as different colors) to be printed at no additional cost. That'a real long shot, though - but as I've discussed before, using this kind of setup really unifies the logo nicely, color-wise.


Tray card for the bearsuit CD "Cat Spectacular". Yes, Microindie does
more than
just records.


Mike was really pleased with the logo. He had a couple releases in the pipeline already, and I'm pretty sure the first release was the one above - an album by a British band named bearsuit. It was cool to see the piece in print, especially so soon after I designed it (a few weeks or so) - and I get nice little care packages of CDs from the label every so often. Free stuff is good.

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